I’m having some occasional memory problems with other apps, and as a result several times lately Devonthink has been forced to close as the machine restarts. In these cases it reopens as a blank slate. (This, IIRC, is new behavior? DT2, I think, usually reopened after a system crash with the same documents?) Since the work I’m doing is sorting through a large batch of documents, what’s open and not open is actually a critical piece of information, so I keep losing hours of work.
I’ve tried to minimize the damage by moving all of those open files to a single small database, and am using a smart group based on last opened. This time around I’m going to create some tags as I go, which should hopefully further limit the damage.
But is there another, cleverer way to find out what documents were open? I looked for a relevant preference but didn’t find one. Tagging or setting labels does not appear to affect the ‘modified’ status, so that doesn’t help, either.
I work on many projects across a broad variety of topics, so rely a great deal on what’s open to remind me of what I’m working on.
Cheers,
Erik
Are you doing system maintenance or having the machine looked at?
It sounds like you have bigger issues than DEVONthink ones, it seems.
I would suggest… getting the machine examined first.
Then I would suggest getting your database(s) and documents opened, then creating a workspace in the Go menu.
In fact, as you work you could occasionally use Go > Workspaces > Update … to preserve the current state.
However, do not treat this as a solution for whatever is ailing your machine.
Thanks for the Workspace pointer – that looks brilliant and hopeful. I’m embarrassed to see how long that feature has been around. I guess I need to review my entire Devonthink education.
As for the machine – thank you for the warning, but it’s fine. It may be fairer to call it a user problem, as I’ve replicated it across multiple machines in the last 6 years. I have a lot of Safari pages open–just like I have a lot of DT3 windows open. Sometimes it’s dozens of Safari windows, some with as many as 30 or 40 tabs. Some websites don’t cause a problem. But some do.
I tend to think of it as someone else causing the problem because there are consistently a few websites that, presumably due to poor design, eat memory. Safari now even warns you of this, either suggesting you close a page to improve performance, or sometimes restarting a page. But sometimes when you have a lot of pages open, or step away, the error compounds, and the system just goes down. I’ve been hit particularly hard in the last couple of weeks because I’m transitioning between two very research intensive projects, meaning more web pages open and more DT3 windows open
To bring this back to Devonthink of course it doesn’t help to have another 40 documents open, but I will say that the new DT3 is far more memory conscious that the last version, and that has helped. Workspace looks even better.
Thanks again for taking the time to point out the solution right in front of me!
Cheers,
Erik
